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Making West Indian Literature Mervyn Morris University of the West Indies - Mona, Anthuriumcaribjournal@Gmail.Com Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal Volume 10 Issue 2 Intellectual Formations: Locating a Caribbean Article 9 Critical Tradition November 2013 Making West Indian Literature Mervyn Morris University of the West Indies - Mona, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium Recommended Citation Morris, Mervyn (2013) "Making West Indian Literature," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 10 : Iss. 2 , Article 9. Available at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol10/iss2/9 This Part II: "The Generation of 1968" is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal by an authorized editor of Scholarly Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Morris: Making West Indian Literature Critics can be important to a literature. But the literature must be produced before it can be sifted for analysis. It may be that, even in the academy, we should pay more attention to nurturing production and trying to understand its processes. The poet, as you know, used to be called a ‘maker’— as in Chaucer the Maker (by John Speirs). This lecture1 — on ‘Making West Indian Literature’ — deals in part with where I’m coming from and what I do as a West Indian poet. But there are also other things to be said. West Indian Literature, as a body of work, is a fairly recent phenomenon. It is possible to make connections back to the eighteenth century, as Paula Burnett does in her scholarly introduction to The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English; but the main body of work acknowledged to be excellent has been done in the last fifty years. In The West Indian Novel and its Background, Kenneth Ramchand takes as his beginning 1903 and the first volume in Tom Redcam’s ill- fated All-Jamaica Library. Ramchand’s year-by-year bibliography lists only 45 books between 1903 and 1951, more of a trickle than a flood. The flow is fairly substantial from 1952. On the basis of critical attention and frequent inclusion on university course lists the ‘major authors’ include V.S. Naipaul, Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Samuel Selvon, Earl Lovelace, Erna Brodber, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Martin Carter and Lorna Goodison. But there are a great many other writers of considerable merit, some with a wider readership than the leaders on the academic list. The department of which I am a member used to be called the Department of English, and is now the Department of Literatures in English. The difference is important, and there is a story to be told. Our University College opened its doors in 1948, to a group of medical students, and the English Department began teaching in 1950. The University College of the West Indies (which I attended from 1954 to 1957) taught towards degrees of London University. The offerings in English were essentially the same as might have been made available in the United Kingdom or at other University Colleges under the tutelage of London. The basic assumption then was that the student choosing to read English Language and Literature had chosen to study, as Edward Baugh put it in 1970, ‘the history of the literature of England, with the inclusion, in recent years, of a few fringe benefits’ (56). (But the so-called ‘literature of England’ could silently accommodate substantial contributions from the Irish, the Scottish, the Welsh and even an American or two.) In keeping with British example, the first major extension of the curriculum was a course in American Literature, introduced in 1963. The first full course in West Indian Literature was introduced in 1969, taught by Kenneth Ramchand. I had the 1 Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Creative Writing & West Indian Literature, delivered at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, March 13, 1997. [Originally published in Making West Indian Literature, Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2005: 1-17.] Published by Scholarly Repository, 2013 1 Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol. 10, Iss. 2 [2013], Art. 9 pleasure of attending many lectures on that course, which was outstanding. Ramchand did a scrupulous reading of each text chosen, in the context of a critical problem or complex of problems to which he related his reading. (The lectures later formed the basis of a book, his Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature). After the course in West Indian Literature a course in African Literature was introduced, then one in Afro-American Literature, then one called the Oral Tradition and Literature. Some of our other courses now include Introduction to Orature, African Diaspora Women’s Literature, Folktale and Proverb, and West Indian Autobiography. And there are courses in Comparative Caribbean Literature (taught in conjunction with colleagues in French and Spanish). With more and more new courses proposed, we have had to decide which courses will be required and which are optional. From its inception, a course in West Indian Literature has been a requirement for students majoring in English. Since 1990, when the University changed from a three-term to a two-semester system, our Department has required that each student majoring in English must study some poetry, some prose fiction and some drama; and must (without counting the same course twice) do at least one course in literary theory, a Shakespeare course, a course in twentieth century fiction and one in West Indian Literature. Partly because of other courses offered, West Indian Literature now inhabits a context somewhat different from that in which it first was introduced. For a student may now — as a direct result of other courses available — be relating studies in West Indian Literature not just to English Literature or mainstream American Literature but to writing by African and African-American women, or to folk tale structures or conventions of performance or theories of autobiography. Our concept of West Indian Literature has expanded. In 1969 there was still a tendency to assume that literature meant novels, short stories, poems, and might also include ‘good’ plays of a certain verbal density. Though we admired and enjoyed them greatly, in 1969 we were not yet ready to promote outstanding non-fiction books from supplementary reading to prescribed texts on literature courses. Some were first prescribed for Special Author undergraduate courses, where the enterprise was to examine the range of a given author’s work. Then books such as George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960), C.L.R. James’s Beyond A Boundary (1963) and V.S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness (1964) were prescribed on an MA Course. The recently established course in West Indian Autobiography has included works such as those, and of course more recent material, such as Jean Rhys’s Smile Please (1975) and Sistren’s Lionheart Gal (1986). Lionheart Gal is in Jamaican Creole, predominantly. In the 1990s we take it for granted that some of the work we prescribe will have been written in Creole. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol10/iss2/9 2 Morris: Making West Indian Literature I do not myself say ‘nation language’ because it seems to me that by the end of Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice the term is taken to mean, not what we used to call ‘dialect’ but, the whole range of West Indian language, including standard English with a regional accent (13). The language continuum of West Indian Literature ranges between our West Indian standard English and our Caribbean Creoles. (According to Loreto Todd, in a book entitled Modern Englishes, ‘A pidgin is a communication system that develops among people who do not share a common language’ [3], and ‘A creole is a pidgin which has become the mother tongue of a group of people’ [4]). What I am calling Creole is what we used to call dialect, or patois. A creole is a language; a dialect is a form of a language; a patois is a low-status dialect. Jamaican Creole is derived mainly from English and some West African languages. We can agree with Louise Bennett when she writes: My Aunty Roachy seh dat it bwile her temper an really bex her fi true anytime she hear anybody a style we Jamaican dialec as ‘corruption of the English language.’For if dat be de case, den dem shoulda call English Language corruption of Norman French an Latin an all dem tarra language what dem seh dat English is derived from. Oonoo hear de wud? ‘Derived.’ English is a derivation but Jamaican Dialec is corruption! What a unfairity! Aunty Roachy seh dat if Jamaican Dialec is corruption of de English Language, den it is also a corruption of de African Twi Language to, a oh! (1) Linguists now often show that some of the forms once deemed ‘corrupt’ or ‘bad’ or ‘broken’ English may be better or more fully understood in relation to one or other of the West African languages which travelled with our African ancestors. Mervyn Alleyne, in Roots of Jamaican Culture, gives as an example the Jamaican Creole word ben (and its variants such as min, en, and wen). He points out that the ‘outer form points in the direction of the English word “been”’ but that the way ben functions in Jamaican Creole is ‘not altogether like English “been”’ and that ‘it fits into a verb phrase structure that is very similar to the verb structure of some West African languages’ (1). In 1969 the University was beginning to recognise formally that literature of merit might be available in Creole as in Standard English. Jamaica Labrish by Louise Bennett, with Notes and Introduction by Rex Nettleford, had appeared in 1966.
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